400 in Little Tokyo Remember Japanese Internees of WWII

In observance of the presidential order issued 44 years ago that sent 120,000 Japanese-Americans to internment camps during World War II, Shisei Tsuneishi joined a candlelight procession through Little Tokyo on Sunday evening.

At 97, he was one of about 400 who participated in the “Day of Remembrance,” held to both honor the internees and to call public attention to efforts by Japanese-Americans to win redress and reparations for lost property and income.

Tsuneishi had been taken from his Los Angeles home and interned at a camp at Heart Mountain, Wyo. Though it was hard for him to make the three-block walk to the remembrance ceremony, “he wanted to come,” his daughter, Florence Nakashima of Los Angeles, said, holding his arm. The elderly man had little to say. He concentrated on his candle, and keeping up with the others, many of whom were far younger and had never been interned.

‘Need to Remember’

The younger ones, like Mariko Yanagihara, 29, of Pasadena, explained that they came out of a “need to remember history. This was a very important time in the life of a whole generation of people,” the pastor’s assistant said at a ceremony later in Little Tokyo Towers. “In many ways the pain and suffering are still going on.”

The Day of Remembrance, sponsored by both the Japanese American Citizens League and the National Coalition for Redress-Reparations, has been an annual event in Southern California for the last five years. It is held to loosely coincide with the anniversary of the signing of presidential Executive Order 9066 on Feb. 19, 1942, which authorized the military to carry out the evacuation and internment. Almost two-thirds of the internees were native-born Americans and the rest were resident aliens.

One of the native-born was David Imahara, 76, who manages a senior citizens’ housing complex in Pacoima. In 1942, he had a house, family and a job in Sacramento. “I came here so people would understand,” he said. “My whole life was ruined.”

This year’s Day of Remembrance came after two recent legal victories for Japanese-Americans. In January, a lawsuit seeking $24 billion for damages sustained by the internees was ordered reinstated by a federal appeals court in Washington. This month, a 44-year-long court battle ended when a federal judge in Seattle invalidated the 1942 conviction of Gordon Hirabayashi, one of three Japanese-Americans put on trial after they refused to be interned.

“Something like this should never happen again,” Frank S. Emi, 69, a retired postal worker from San Gabriel, said. He was not only interned at Heart Mountain, but later in the war was jailed for 18 months at the federal prison in Leavenworth, Kan., for contesting the government’s right to draft him.

“I felt the draft law . . . would be unconstitutional (when) applied to residents of concentration camps,” he said.

But today he is not angry. “It’s hard to be angry that long at anything,” he said. “But when you think about it, it brings back feelings. It seems like yesterday, but it was almost 45 years ago. You have an experience like that, it doesn’t go away. . . .”